Best DataType for content system

Hello,
On our corporate website, we will be using email notifications for
various things. I would like for our marketing guy to be able to edit
the email templates over the web so that I don't have to keep updating
them myself for every little change. I want to store the templates
within the database (since they will be small). The templates will be
HTML based and not more than a few thousand bytes in length. Should I
use a VARCHAR or VARBINARY, or what? I would assume VARCHAR, but I'm
not sure.

Thanks,
WillFoehammer (foehammer@.hotmail.com) writes:
> On our corporate website, we will be using email notifications for
> various things. I would like for our marketing guy to be able to edit
> the email templates over the web so that I don't have to keep updating
> them myself for every little change. I want to store the templates
> within the database (since they will be small). The templates will be
> HTML based and not more than a few thousand bytes in length. Should I
> use a VARCHAR or VARBINARY, or what? I would assume VARCHAR, but I'm
> not sure.

Unless you intend to compress the templates to be able handle case
that the marketing guys enters more than 8000 characters, there is
no reason to use VARBINARY, use VARCHAR.

--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@.sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techin.../2000/books.asp